Birthday

My Birthday was this past week! Thanks for all the thoughts and messages, I missed being around close friends and family, it was great to hear from everyone.

This past weekend, the Ecuadorian family helped me celebrate with an Ecuadorian party. Being my first birthday in Ecuador - this was obviously my first experience being a host at an Ecuadorian party … How did I do? Um.... I flopped big time, and, possibly made the biggest rookie host-mistakes – not enough food, a HUGE no-no here in Ecuador. My aunt nicely assured me that I was forgiven since this was my first party, and everyone appeared to enjoy themselves throughout the night. But, here, a topic of conversation the day(s) after a party is about the sobras, or plate(s) of leftover food that the host gives you upon leaving a party to take home. From here on out, I will always cook double when preparing for guests in Ecuador.

One of my sweet PCV friends came into town for the weekend, but other than that, I hadn't made any plans to do anything for my birthday. That's where I got lucky to have such an awesome host mother/family- she gathered her family and everyone made sure I knew how to correctly celebrate a birthday (minus the lack-of-sobras). Around noon, my host mother, sister and cousin cooked me two cakes – one vanilla with chocolate frosting and the other chocolate with a white cream frosting, both had strawberry designs on top.

They made apple flavored gellitan, ham-pepper-pickled onion-olive on a stick appetizers, rice and soup. I was in charge of making burritos, so we made 25 tortillas, beans, guacamole, and aji and cut up cheese and tomatoes. I figured this would be more than enough, and shrugged off preparing a chicken as well.

After the family showed up, I got my face plastered into a cake ...

The burritos, cake, rice and gellitan were quickly demolished and we had a four hour dance party. The living room barely fit everyone, but no one seemed to notice. The kids started playing a lime-on-a-spoon dance competition. Everyone holds their spoon with a lime on top in their mouth while dancing, if you drop your lime you're out, the last person dancing wins! Then we played various balloon games, like: “dance with a balloon between two people”, “balloon hot potato”, and “hit the balloon back and forth”. Like a lot of Ecuadorian games I've experienced, these games consist of punishments for the losers. Let me explain in a little more detail, for “balloon hot potato, ” if the music stops and you are holding the balloon, you have to do a penatencia (penalty or punishment), which is anything the other people make up in the room that you have to do. This particular night, it usually included dancing in the middle of the circle or moving your body in some other funny manner in front of everyone. The rest of the night was filled with dance parties. I tried to but on some American music, but they kept wanting their beats ... I need to get YMCA and the electric slide for the next party ...

It was a fabulous party and everyone enjoyed themselves ... even though they went home empty handed :)